Political
economist, b. in Philadelphia, 2 Sept. 1839. He went to sea at an early
age, and, reaching California in 1858, remained there, becoming finally
a journalist. In 1879 he published Progress and Poverty, which was issued
in the following year in New York and London, and soon acquired a world-wide
reputation. This book is an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions
and of increase of want with increase of wealth, in which the previously
held doctrines as to the distribution of wealth and the tendency of wages
to a minimum are examined and reconstructed. In the fact that rent tends
to increase not only with increase of population but with all improvements
that increase productive power, Mr. George finds the cause of the
well-known
tendency to the increase of land values and to the decrease of the proportion
of the produce of wealth that goes to labor and capital, while in the speculative
holding of land thus engendered he traces the tendency to force wages to
a minimum and the primary cause of paroxysms of industrial depression.

The remedy
for these he declares to be the appropriation of rent by the community,
thus making land virtually common property, while giving the user secure
possession and leaving to the producer the full advantage of his exertion
and investment. In 1880 Mr. George removed to New York. In 1881 he published
The Irish Land Question, and in 1883-4 he made another trip at the invitation
of the Scottish land restoration league, producing on both tours a marked
effect. In 1886 he was the candidate of the United labor party for mayor
of New York, and received 68,110 votes against 90,552 for Abram S. Hewitt,
the Democratic candidate, and 60,435 for Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican
candidate. Soon after this, Mr. George founded the Standard, a weekly
newspaper, which he still edits (1887). He has also published Social Problems
(1884), and Protection or Free-Trade (1886). The latter is a radical
examination of the tariff question, in which connection is made between
the controversy on that subject and the views as to land with which Mr.
George has become identified.

Appletons
Cyclopædia of American Biography / ed. by James Grant Wilson and John Fiske.
New York : D. Appleton and Company, [v.2], 1888.
See: San FranciscoLabor for more about Henry George.